If you’ve ever played the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, then you already understand the mission of Yahoo’s new initiative, “The Small World Experiment.”

By teaming up with Facebook, Yahoo is attempting to prove that there is always less than six people between any two random people in the world.

Here’s how it works. Go to Yahoo Research and click to become a Sender. You’ll have to agree to some legalese, then you’ll be matched up with a stranger. I was given a man with a tech background from Tel Aviv who now lives in France. Next, you choose one person from your Facebook friends whom you think is most likely to know or get you closer to this person. I went with the most globally-oriented person on my list since I know I have to cross an ocean to make this connection.

Zippy, the Zip Code Man has been helping the post office route letters since the 1960′s and now Facebook has joined the party. As of yesterday, advertisers on Facebook can now chose to target their ads by state, city or zip code.

It may seem like city goes hand-in-hand with zip, but for a local business on a budget, it can make a big difference. Take a large city such as Los Angeles. People from one side of the city, aren’t going to sit in forty minutes of traffic to get to a coffee shop when they can find ten within ten minutes. With Facebook’s new zip option, that coffee shop owner can chose only those zip codes within a few mile radius of his shop. Or even within a half-circle if the radius includes the bad part of town.